Improving FPS and latency

Higher FPS in a raid means higher DPS and better reaction-time to events.

FPS: here is a new addon TweakWoW which lets you tweak settings (including a reduction in Dalaran lag, worked for me) that are normally hidden in the wtf/config file. A recent version added support for multi-core CPUs and I saw a massive speed boost on my Intel i7 920.

Tweaking cache setting to make Dalaran faster

Latency: these tips improve latency but they might have other consequences (but didn’t for most people whose comments I’ve read). Very effective if you’re a high ping in say Australia to the US servers, but also works here in the UK to improve latency. Reports of reduction from 200ms to 50ms. They’re basically getting around the Nagle algorithm.

Lowerping.com: more effectively albeit a paid service (AU$20 for 3 months for US servers), you can use lowerping who provide an improved latency for Australian, Latin American, Japanese and other regional players who are on US or EU servers.

Playing on US server from EU ping went down from ~400 to 180 to 200 ms in-game.

Profiling: to profile your CPU and memory usage, to look for hogs, I use BrokerCPU coupled with Fortress to give it a GUI. I found that Big Wigs, AG Unitframes and Recount were using more idle CPU than I’d like (not that’s a huge problem). I swapped them all out for oUF Caellian, Skada and DBM. Most recently I’m testing Shadowed unit frames and they’re quick too. Bartender is using idle CPU too, so I swapped it for Dominos.

I’ve heard Pitbull Auras are/used to be a terrible CPU hog, and that Dogtags can be too.

DNS: I also found switching to OpenDNS helped general internet speed. It’s free, took about 3 minutes to set up; just changed to a manual DNS setting on my ADSL router.

8 comments to Improving FPS and latency

To be honest, unless it’s insanely high idle CPU utilization is pretty meaningless. If you want a meaningful test you need to run your profiler over the length of a 30 minute BG or (less likely, because the profiler will probably kill performance) Raid.

As for Pitbull/Dogtags, Dogtags does have a rep for being pretty CPU hungry, but recent builds of PitBull4 have included a Lua text option that is considerably faster. Probably not as light as Ouf, to be sure, but also not nearly as limited.

I agree on the idle CPU. I had to eliminate every variable for myself because of a really weird FPS issue I had when zoning out of Dalaran into Ice Crown. I had no single root cause, unfortunately, so couldn’t just fix it. Instead, I went for every optimisation I could.

Fair point on idle CPU in general though, if it’s like 1 to 4% you should be fine.

Just in the last few days, I’ve gone back to Recount because (a) Skada didn’t show my misses, which was annoying when tuning my melee to-hit (b) I wanted to do some charting. Will re-test the CPU issue, but so far, overall FPS has remained exactly the same thanks to TweakWOW, I’d say.

I found that it does not make any improvement on lowerping.com’s already very zippy service. So you can get a gateway like theirs (paid for) or use Leatrix; you don’t need both. Lowerping’s better though.